Master of the Mise-en-Scène

By

David Mermelstein

Updated March 10, 2011 12:01 a.m. ET

Josef von Sternberg was one of Hollywood's great autocrats. He was also one of its great artists. Best known today for having made Marlene Dietrich a star—he directed her in seven pictures between 1930 and 1935—Sternberg first made a name for himself in the mid-1920s, just as silent movies reached their zenith. That early achievement is recalled and justly celebrated in "3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg," a set of DVDs recently released by Criterion.

ENLARGE

Josef von Sternberg, best known for making Marlene Dietrich a star.
Getty Images

Born Jonas Sternberg in Vienna in 1894, the budding auteur shuttled between there and New York from 1901 to 1908, when his family settled for good in the New World. He broke into moviemaking as many did in cinema's early years, working his way up from menial tasks in the business—in his case, cleaning and repairing movie prints in Fort Lee, N.J., the capital of American filmmaking in those pre-Hollywood days.

Sternberg's first success as a director came in 1925, with "The Salvation Hunters," a depiction of underclass life that was novel enough to attract acclaim from Charlie Chaplin and investment from Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Though the picture did not perform well at the box office, Sternberg's talent for mise-en-scène was widely recognized. No one else in Hollywood could match his relentless perfectionism in setting or lighting scenes. (Not surprisingly, he disdained the term "movies," instead preferring "motion pictures.")

The Criterion box picks up the story two years later, when Paramount entrusted Sternberg with a Ben Hecht scenario titled "Underworld" (1927). Though often referred to as the first gangster picture, it is more accurately the film that sparked the genre's mass appeal. And it's easy to see why.

"Underworld" centers on a love triangle involving a gangland boss, Bull Weed (George Bancroft); his aloof moll, Feathers (Evelyn Brent); and Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), a drunk whom Bull rehabilitates. But though the melodrama is earnest and at times moving, and the performances are first-rate, the film's allure lies in its pacing and atmosphere—especially the scenes in the Dreamland club, where rival criminals congregate uneasily; the prison sequence; and the elaborate final shootout, a prototype for what would devolve into cinematic boilerplate in the 1930s.

In "The Last Command" (1928), starring the celebrated German actor Emil Jannings, Sternberg tells the story of a Russian general whose fall after the revolution is so complete that he's reduced to working as a Hollywood extra. The picture starts near the tale's conclusion, with the general a shell of his former self, so the shock is extreme when we see him restored to vigor in the flashbacks that constitute most of the film.

A stew of romance and politics in equal measure, "The Last Command" contains some memorable set pieces—particularly the assault on the general's train by a mob, a scene that prefigures aspects of David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago" (1965). But Jannings's touching portrayal of a powerful man brought low is what most impresses. He won the first best-actor Oscar for his pains, which Sternberg maximized on screen in ways both subtle and overt.

Of Sternberg's three surviving silents for Paramount (two were lost, which makes Criterion's set "complete"), "The Docks of New York" (1928) most anticipates the director's work after the arrival of sound. The plot, pure hokum, revolves around a whirlwind waterfront romance between Bill Roberts (Bancroft again), an independent-minded stoker, and Mae (Betty Compson), the ostensibly weak woman he just rescued from suicide.

The film's archetypical performances are certainly appealing—in addition to the stars, there's a lowlife ship's engineer and his frequently deserted, and thus unfaithful, wife. But Sternberg's masterfully conjured fantasy squalor, a shabby-chic world distinctly his own, leaves an even deeper impression. In this he was assisted by one of Old Hollywood's great craftsmen: the German-born art director Hans Dreier, who following "The Last Command" and "The Docks of New York" would work with Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. (The cinematographer Bert Glennon, who shot "Underworld" and "The Last Command," occupies a similarly exalted status. He eventually hitched his wagon to John Ford, but not until after he worked on two of Sternberg's most famous sound films.)

The critical success of "The Last Command" and "The Docks of New York" notwithstanding, Sternberg's lack of a commercial hit after "Underworld" caused him to quit Hollywood and head to Berlin to direct a film starring Jannings, "The Blue Angel" (1930). It would be his first picture exclusively in sound—and his first with Dietrich, who codified her temptress persona under his tutelage. Filmed in both German and English, its international success once more reversed his fortunes, and he returned to America to direct Dietrich in a passel of projects now widely regarded as classics: "Morocco" (1930), "Dishonored" (1931), "Shanghai Express" (1932), "Blonde Venus" (1932), "The Scarlet Empress" (1934) and "The Devil Is a Woman" (1935).

But Sternberg's talents were not ideally matched to the sound era. Plot was never his strong suit, and his ability to elicit effective performances from actors with voices varied widely. So once the singular Dietrich struck out on her own—they never worked together after "The Devil Is a Woman"—he lost the ample cover she provided. For proof one need only watch the director's risible adaptation of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" (1935), with Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov. Though Sternberg made films as late as the early 1950s, there were no more comebacks after an aborted attempt in 1937 to film Robert Graves's "I, Claudius," with Charles Laughton in the title role and Merle Oberon as Messalina.

This is what makes Criterion's set so dear. With pristine prints and the welcome addition of Robert Israel's newly composed but historically informed scores, film lovers can savor the work of a great director unhindered by expressive constraints. On these discs Josef von Sternberg's meticulously framed images speak for themselves.

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